Is Leo Burnett's Rajdeepak Das India’s craziest ad man?

Crazy in a good way, that is. BE finds the method to the madness of Leo Burnett’s chief creative officer, and how it’s worked for Amazon, Bajaj, HP and moreRavi Balakrishnan | ETBrandEquity | Updated: May 13, 2017, 17:16 IST

We spent over an hour with Rajdeepak Das, chronicling his highly atypical creative journey, from the time he showed up for his first ad interview as a city burned around him, to the time he almost kidnapped a leading Thai ad man, to the years spent making ‘acts not ads’ more than just a slogan. Here’s Raj in his own words:

When I was growing up, I thought the people in advertising wake up every day and have fun

My dad was a doctor and my mum a lawyer. When I was young, I’d see the work from Piyush Pandey, Mohammed Khan and Ravi Deshpande. I didn’t know who these people were at the time, but I just felt “Every day, these guys get up and have fun.”

I went for my first job interview, plumb in the middle of a riot

After completing college with a bachelor’s degree in business management, I ran into someone from O&M at Bengaluru’s Big Bang awards who told me to show up the next day for a chat. They gave me a copy test and told me to be back in 10 days.I showed up in 10 days’ time and the first thing the secretary says is, “What’s wrong with you? Why are you here? You know what’s happening, right?” I told them “You said come back in 10 days, right?” And the CD came out and said “There’s a riot outside. Rajkumar has been kidnapped! People are burning things!” I said “I know, but how can I not come when you told me to show up and gave me a chance? I know the city is burning, but I have a few ideas I want to share.” They sent me off saying they’d give me another chance.

I got into MICA and never slept.

I signed up for a four month course and spent my nights seeing every piece of work that won at Cannes for the last 10 years. MICA had the best ad library in the country. A lot of guys came to teach us from Ram Madhvani to Alok Nanda. At the end of it, I had a couple of job offers in Mumbai but I opted to remain in Bengaluru because it was a cooler place to be. I mean, you had good clubs, parties till 3 in the morning at the time, and you had a Roger Waters concert there! I thought I won’t go anywhere else. I started doing the rounds of agencies to the point where they told me “If we see you here again, we’ll throw you out.”

I was finally hired by Neil Flory at Enterprise Nexus, a 25 year old creative director, who’d moved from Singapore. He was more focused on ideas than on art or copy. We had a three minute interview and in the fourth minute, I was in. We were all very young guys – around 25 years old. I didn’t have an art background and the guys at the agency taught me art. It was a really mad time. We never went home. That’s what happens when you love your job.

My first ad was for a pitch

It was for the retail outlet World of Titan, against Lowe and O&M. They wanted to celebrate selling 50 million watches in 15 years. I did an interesting TV commercial. The story is about a bunch of people on a railway station platform in a small village, waiting for a train. And then there’s a typical announcement “Gaadi do ghantederisechalrahihain” The super said, “In 15 years, we’ve sold 50 million watches…obviously, we haven’t sold enough.” It also marked the beginning of my journey when it came to awards. That year, the 3As of I had an international jury and this film won the international jury Grand Prix.

I kept being told my work is ‘not for India’. So I left

When you are young and impressionable, you learn a lot. More than good creatives, I met some really interesting clients. I was doing good work but not the best. You need people who are much better than you to do great work.

Around the time, I saw a very funny ad: belly button face.

I was doing some mad work in Contract. But every time I’d do something crazy, they’d say ‘This is not for India. It will work only in Thailand.’ Around that time, I got a DVD that had the best Thai ads and decided to burn myself a copy. I’d taken it to a copy shop near my house and when I went there to pick it up, I saw some 30 people watching those ads — the dobhi, the vegetable vendor, the plumber — all laughing. Even people who didn’t know the language or couldn't read subtitles were enjoying these ads and able to understand them.

At the time, BBDO’s Bangkok office — which had done belly button face — was among the best in the world; No. 5 globally, and No. 1 in Asia. I decided I wanted to work there. I was a junior art director, and all the money I had went into getting to Bangkok. I would have gone to BBDO Paris if I had Rs 60,000 and tried for the best agency in the world. But since I had only Rs 25,000, it became all or nothing when it came to BBDO Bangkok.

I almost kidnapped BBDO’s Suthisak Sucharittanonta

Suthi was Asia’s No 1 ranking creative, 15 years in a row. I went to his office every day for 17 days. Another creative in Thailand wanted to hire me, but I told him I’d made my mind up about joining BBDO. So, he gave me a pass for one of their local awards, where I’d find Suthi. I found the car Suthi was using, jumped right in and said ‘I won’t let you go till you meet me.’ He agreed and I got the job. He’s even written about this in his autobiography!

To date, he’s my mentor. I was the mad child out there. We had 125 Thai employees and one Indian. I created some of my best campaigns there, did a lot of experiments.

A lot of my new age thinking began in BBDO Bangkok

For instance, we created a massive animated game site for Prudential; the entire concept was ‘we are listening.’ This was in the mid-2000s; totally unheard of.

I discovered language was not a barrier, when the ideas are strong. It’s about getting the right opportunities and having the nerve to do it.

For instance, the campaign we came up with for a retail chain, Homepro. The line was ‘with prices so cheap anyone can sell’ and so we used people picked off the streets and gave them 15 seconds of fame:

Homepro became the coolest brand in 2007 to 2009, a time when Thailand went through a financial crisis. The client had a sale going on and didn’t want to spend too much pushing it. We went in store and got the staff to do some crazy things with the appliances. This was not traditional advertising:

At the time, social media was not strong and I didn’t really know what PR was. Cool Fahrenheit 93 FM, a radio station, wanted to do something for World Environment Day. We got around 200 school children in uniform to beg at traffic signals and places like that. What they were asking for was not money, but a better environment. We got them to ask people to stop using plastic bags, lower the temperature of the ACs in their cars and things like that.

What I was doing was different (from even Thai advertising at the time), which was mainly humorous and TVC based. I brought an idea to it. The begging idea was not funny; it was about a concept, my way of seeing things.

I had a choice between BBDO NY and BBDO NZ. I chose BBDO Mumbai

I thought when you are working abroad, you are working for their agencies and contributing to the culture of that country. But once you return, you can start your own culture. Around that time, I met Josy and that was it.

I wasn’t tempted by bigger budgets and clients; those you can get anywhere. It was about working with your own people, creating something new.We did a lot of work for Gillette like

Gillette WALS

Gillette Shavesutra

Gillette Soldier for Women

The biggest problem when I spoke to people was they’d ask me ‘But what about the TVCs?” I did that with the Visa cycle ad to show I can do it. But I’ve found good marketing guys ask you for a solution and not a TV commercial.

Visa

I didn’t join advertising to win awards

I felt creativity has the power to do something bigger. I was doing good in BBDO — the last piece I worked on before leaving was touch the pickle — but I missing out on something, finding the solution to a problem. To date, I think a line will not save the day.

I was there when the Gates foundation celebrated no polio day. I looked back and realised what I am doing is so small! There’s so much power to reach people. The most celebrated work on polio was not so much the campaign with Amitabh Bachchan but the teachers and government, going home to home, giving polio drops. It was not about the communication but the solution.

What Gandhi did during the freedom struggle was revolutionary: going north to south and east to west. That’s how it happened – not due to a commercial. At Seattle, they didn’t talk about the ads but about how people went from home to home.

I was actually thinking of moving to Silicon Valley when I got a call from Mark Tutssel. We chatted for a couple of hours on Human Kind and purpose and finding solutions that impact people’s lives. And that’s how I met Saurabh (Leo Burnett CEO Saurabh Varma).

When you come from a middle-class background, you don’t think about fancy ideas

Given my background – I come from Orissa, by the way – you look at things very realistically. You have this much money and time, and this is the opportunity: what’s the most you can get out of it? When I put myself in other people’s shoes, will I talk about this idea?

The 2000 or 10000 people we touched with the world environment day idea will take it to their grave since they didn’t just see it; they actually felt it. That’s what I wanted. More than people seeing it, smiling and then switching off.

I want to shake people up. How do you go beyond your budget, to do that? The TVC is the obvious option to be kept in reserve. I keep asking my team, what is the 18th idea? Because that’s when you are defining a solution and finding a way to talk a different language. Don’t spend too much time talking about the problem, understand it and find a solution.

It’s similar with our new work for HP - Roads That Honk. It’s a solution to a problem — accidents on highways — more than it is advertising.

V for Bajaj came from a genuine effort to save a national treasure and it touched people.

‘AurDikhao’ for Amazon was built around a very interesting human insight. How do you give a foreign company that’s a late entrant into the market the shopping culture that we have? There was no connection between people and brand and we needed to get emotion in to make that happen.

Sometimes, your solutions are not right for the time

With Olx Mad Ads, we realised when you have an idea, you need to be simple and straight about it. We never talked about how it works. We expected people to play around and find that out, when in fact we had to take them step by step. I think it was one of our best experiments. But we were thinking about it from the head and not the heart. Incidentally, LetGo, OLX’s global counterpart took the platform to some other countries where it works.

I don’t present options

If you believe in it, you go with it. We may discuss a few ideas at the planning stage, but even at pitches we always go with just one solution.

The moment you take critics seriously, you begin working only to be talked about

Which is why I don’t look at critics and stay busy creating. I never comment on other people’s work, either. I have no idea in what circumstances it was created in, and if I don’t know that, how can I critique it?

I'm always asking, how can you say 'I don't like this?' Tell me why. When things go wrong, mostly it happens when you are talking to someone on the phone or not trying to understand the person in front of you.

We complicate things by saying markets are different

People are the same all over the world. The navarasas we have in our country are applicable universally. Sometimes you get an international movie, even without subtitles. When things go wrong and mostly it happens when you are talking about someone on the phone or not trying to understand the person in front of you. If you are good at Pictionary and dumb charades, the world will be a better place for you. If you are good at Taboo, you are fucked.